She had not again, for weeks, had Mrs. Assingham so effectually in presence as on the afternoon of that lady’s return from the Easter party at Matcham; but the intermission was made up as soon as the date of the migration to Fawns — that of the more or less simultaneous adjournment of the two houses — began to be discussed. It had struck her, promptly, that this renewal, with an old friend, of the old terms she had talked of with her father, was the one opening, for her spirit, that wouldn’t too much advertise or betray her. Even her father, who had always, as he would have said, “believed in” their ancient ally, wouldn’t necessarily suspect her of invoking Fanny’s aid toward any special inquiry — and least of all if Fanny would only act as Fanny so easily might. Maggie’s measure of Fanny’s ease would have been agitating to Mrs. Assingham had it been all at once revealed to her — as, for that matter, it was soon destined to become even on a comparatively graduated showing. Our young woman’s idea, in particular, was that her safety, her escape from being herself suspected of suspicion, would proceed from this friend’s power to cover, to protect and, as might be, even showily to represent her — represent, that is, her relation to the form of the life they were all actually leading. This would doubtless be, as people said, a large order; but that Mrs. Assingham existed, substantially, or could somehow be made prevailingly to exist, for her private benefit, was the finest flower Maggie had plucked from among the suggestions sown, like abundant seed, on the occasion of the entertainment offered in Portland Place to the Matcham company. Mrs. Assingham, that night, rebounding from dejection, had bristled with bravery and sympathy; she had then absolutely, she had perhaps recklessly, for herself, betrayed the deeper and darker consciousness — an impression it would now be late for her inconsistently to attempt to undo. It was with a wonderful air of giving out all these truths that the Princess at present approached her again; making doubtless at first a sufficient scruple of letting her know what in especial she asked of her, yet not a bit ashamed, as she in fact quite expressly declared, of Fanny’s discerned foreboding of the strange uses she might perhaps have for her. Quite from the first, really, Maggie said extraordinary things to her, such as “You can help me, you know, my dear, when nobody else can;” such as “I almost wish, upon my word, that you had something the matter with you, that you had lost your health, or your money, or your reputation (forgive me, love!) so that I might be with you as much as I want, or keep you with ME, without exciting comment, without exciting any other remark than that such kindnesses are ‘like’ me.” We have each our own way of making up for our unselfishness, and Maggie, who had no small self at all as against her husband or her father and only a weak and uncertain one as against her stepmother, would verily, at this crisis, have seen Mrs. Assingham’s personal life or liberty sacrificed without a pang.
The attitude that the appetite in question maintained in her was to draw peculiar support moreover from the current aspects and agitations of her victim. This personage struck her, in truth, as ready for almost anything; as not perhaps effusively protesting, yet as wanting with a restlessness of her own to know what she wanted. And in the long run — which was none so long either — there was to be no difficulty, as happened, about that. It was as if, for all the world, Maggie had let her see that she held her, that she made her, fairly responsible for something; not, to begin with, dotting all the i’s nor hooking together all the links, but treating her, without insistence, rather with caressing confidence, as there to see and to know, to advise and to assist. The theory, visibly, had patched itself together for her that the dear woman had somehow, from the early time, had a hand in ALL their fortunes, so that there was no turn of their common relations and affairs that couldn’t be traced back in some degree to her original affectionate interest. On this affectionate interest the good lady’s young friend now built, before her eyes — very much as a wise, or even as a mischievous, child, playing on the floor, might pile up blocks, skilfully and dizzily, with an eye on the face of a covertly-watching elder.
When the blocks tumbled down they but acted after the nature of blocks; yet the hour would come for their rising so high that the structure would have to be noticed and admired. Mrs. Assingham’s appearance of unreservedly giving herself involved meanwhile, on her own side, no separate recognitions: her face of almost anxious attention was directed altogether to her young friend’s so vivid felicity; it suggested that she took for granted, at the most, certain vague recent enhancements of that state. If the Princess now, more than before, was going and going, she was prompt to publish that she beheld her go, that she had always known she WOULD, sooner or later, and that any appeal for participation must more or less contain and invite the note of triumph. There was a blankness in her blandness, assuredly, and very nearly an extravagance in her generalising gaiety; a precipitation of cheer particularly marked whenever they met again after short separations: meetings during the first flush of which Maggie sometimes felt reminded of other looks in other faces; of two strangely unobliterated impressions above all, the physiognomic light that had played out in her husband at the shock — she had come at last to talk to herself of the “shock”— of his first vision of her on his return from Matcham and Gloucester, and the wonder of Charlotte’s beautiful bold wavering gaze when, the next morning in Eaton Square, this old friend had turned from the window to begin to deal with her.
If she had dared to think of it so crudely she would have said that Fanny was afraid of her, afraid of something she might say or do, even as, for their few brief seconds, Amerigo and Charlotte had been — which made, exactly, an expressive element common to the three. The difference however was that this look had in the dear woman its oddity of a constant renewal, whereas it had never for the least little instant again peeped out of the others. Other looks, other lights, radiant and steady, with the others, had taken its place, reaching a climax so short a time ago, that morning of the appearance of the pair on the balcony of her house to overlook what she had been doing with her father; when their general interested brightness and beauty, attuned to the outbreak of summer, had seemed to shed down warmth and welcome and the promise of protection. They were conjoined not to do anything to startle her — and now at last so completely that, with experience and practice, they had almost ceased to fear their liability. Mrs. Assingham, on the other hand, deprecating such an accident not less, had yet less assurance, as having less control. The high pitch of her cheer, accordingly, the tentative, adventurous expressions, of the would-be smiling order, that preceded her approach even like a squad of skirmishers, or whatever they were called, moving ahead of the baggage train — these things had at the end of a fortnight brought a dozen times to our young woman’s lips a challenge that had the cunning to await its right occasion, but of the relief of which, as a demonstration, she meanwhile felt no little need. “You’ve such a dread of my possibly complaining to you that you keep pealing all the bells to drown my voice; but don’t cry out, my dear, till you’re hurt — and above all ask yourself how I can be so wicked as to complain. What in the name of all that’s fantastic can you dream that I have to complain OF?” Such inquiries the Princess temporarily succeeded in repressing, and she did so, in a measure, by the aid of her wondering if this ambiguity with which her friend affected her wouldn’t be at present a good deal like the ambiguity with which she herself must frequently affect her father. She wondered how she should enjoy, on HIS part, such a take-up as she but just succeeded, from day to day, in sparing Mrs. Assingham, and that made for her trying to be as easy with this associate as Mr. Verver, blessed man, all indulgent but all inscrutable, was with his daughter. She had extracted from her, none the less, a vow in respect to the time that, if the Colonel might be depended on, they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more, in this connection, or inspired her with a more intimate interest, than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte’s view of a long visit, even from such allies, was there to be reckoned with.
Fanny stood off from that proposition as visibly to the Princess, and as consciously to herself, as she might have backed away from the edge of a chasm into which she feared to slip; a truth that contributed again to keep before our young woman her own constant danger of advertising her subtle processes. That Charlotte should have begun to be restrictive about the Assinghams — which she had never, and for a hundred obviously good reasons, been before — this in itself was a fact of the highest value for Maggie, and of a value enhanced by the silence in which Fanny herself so much too unmistakably dressed it. What gave it quite thrillingly its price was exactly the circumstance that it thus opposed her to her stepmother more actively — if she was to back up her friends for holding out — than she had ever yet been opposed; though of course with the involved result of the fine chance given Mrs. Verver to ask her husband for explanations. Ah, from the moment she should be definitely CAUGHT in opposition there would be naturally no saying how much Charlotte’s opportunities might multiply! What would become of her father, she hauntedly asked, if his wife, on the one side, should begin to press him to call his daughter to order, and the force of old habit — to put it only at that — should dispose him, not less effectively, to believe in this young person at any price? There she was, all round, imprisoned in the circle of the reasons it was impossible she should give — certainly give HIM. The house in the country was his house, and thereby was Charlotte’s; it was her own and Amerigo’s only so far as its proper master and mistress should profusely place it at their disposal. Maggie felt of course that she saw no limit to her father’s profusion, but this couldn’t be even at the best the case with Charlotte’s, whom it would never be decent, when all was said, to reduce to fighting for her preferences. There were hours, truly, when the Princess saw herself as not unarmed for battle if battle might only take place without spectators.
This last advantage for her, was, however, too sadly out of the question; her sole strength lay in her being able to see that if Charlotte wouldn’t “want” the Assinghams it would be because that sentiment too would have motives and grounds. She had all the while command of one way of meeting any objection, any complaint, on his wife’s part, reported to her by her father; it would be open to her to retort to his possible “What are your reasons, my dear?” by a lucidly-produced “What are hers, love, please?— isn’t that what we had better know? Mayn’t her reasons be a dislike, beautifully founded, of the presence, and thereby of the observation, of persons who perhaps know about her things it’s inconvenient to her they should know?” That hideous card she might in mere logic play — being by this time, at her still swifter private pace, intimately familiar with all the fingered pasteboard in her pack. But she could play it only on the forbidden issue of sacrificing him; the issue so forbidden that it involved even a horror of finding out if he would really have consented to be sacrificed. What she must do she must do by keeping her hands off him; and nothing meanwhile, as we see, had less in common with that scruple than such a merciless manipulation of their yielding beneficiaries as her spirit so boldly revelled in. She saw herself, in this connexion, without detachment — saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If SHE could face the awkwardness of the persistence of her friends at Fawns in spite of Charlotte, she somehow looked to them for an inspiration of courage that would improve upon her own. They were in short not only themselves to find a plausibility and an audacity, but were somehow by the way to pick up these forms for her, Maggie, as well. And she felt indeed that she was giving them scant time longer when, one afternoon in Portland Place, she broke out with an irrelevance that was merely superficial.
“What awfulness, in heaven’s name, is there between them? What do you believe, what do you KNOW?”
Oh, if she went by faces her visitor’s sudden whiteness, at this, might have carried her far! Fanny Assingham turned pale for it, but there was something in such an appearance, in the look it put into the eyes, that renewed Maggie’s conviction of what this companion had been expecting. She had been watching it come, come from afar, and now that it was there, after all, and the first convulsion over, they would doubtless soon find themselves in a more real relation. It was there because of the Sunday luncheon they had partaken of alone together; it was there, as strangely as one would, because of the bad weather, the cold perverse June rain, that was making the day wrong; it was there because it stood for the whole sum of the perplexities and duplicities among which our young woman felt herself lately to have picked her steps; it was there because Amerigo and Charlotte were again paying together alone a “week end” visit which it had been Maggie’s plan infernally to promote — just to see if, this time, they really would; it was there because she had kept Fanny, on her side, from paying one she would manifestly have been glad to pay, and had made her come instead, stupidly, vacantly, boringly, to luncheon: all in the spirit of celebrating the fact that the Prince and Mrs. Verver had thus put it into her own power to describe them exactly as they were. It had abruptly occurred, in truth, that Maggie required the preliminary help of determining HOW they were; though, on the other hand, before her guest had answered her question everything in the hour and the place, everything in all the conditions, affected her as crying it out. Her guest’s stare of ignorance, above all — that of itself at first cried it out. “‘Between them?’ What do you mean?”
“Anything there shouldn’t be, there shouldn’t have BEEN— all this time. Do you believe there is — or what’s your idea?”
Fanny’s idea was clearly, to begin with, that her young friend had taken her breath away; but she looked at her very straight and very hard. “Do you speak from a suspicion of your own?”
“I speak, at last, from a torment. Forgive me if it comes out. I’ve been thinking for months and months, and I’ve no one to turn to, no one to help me to make things out; no impression but my own, don’t you see? to go by.”
“You’ve been thinking for months and months?” Mrs. Assingham took it in. “But WHAT then, dear Maggie, have you been thinking?”
“Well, horrible things — like a little beast that I perhaps am. That there may be something — something wrong and dreadful, something they cover up.”
The elder woman’s colour had begun to come back; she was able, though with a visible effort, to face the question less amazedly. “You imagine, poor child, that the wretches are in love? Is that it?”
But Maggie for a minute only stared back at her. “Help me to find out WHAT I imagine. I don’t know — I’ve nothing but my perpetual anxiety. Have you any?— do you see what I mean? If you’ll tell me truly, that at least, one way or the other, will do something for me.”
Fanny’s look had taken a peculiar gravity — a fulness with which it seemed to shine. “Is what it comes to that you’re jealous of Charlotte?”
“Do you mean whether I hate her?”— and Maggie thought. “No; not on account of father.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Assingham returned, “that isn’t what one would suppose. What I ask is if you’re jealous on account of your husband.”
“Well,” said Maggie presently, “perhaps that may be all. If I’m unhappy I’m jealous; it must come to the same thing; and with you, at least, I’m not afraid of the word. If I’m jealous, don’t you see? I’m tormented,” she went on —“and all the more if I’m helpless. And if I’m both helpless AND tormented I stuff my pocket-handkerchief into my mouth, I keep it there, for the most part, night and day, so as not to be heard too indecently moaning. Only now, with you, at last, I can’t keep it longer; I’ve pulled it out, and here ............